Gillian Cowlishaw Visit
September 2006
Prof Gillian Cowlishaw, ARC Professorial Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Technology in Sydney is visiting Monash University in September to talk with anthropology undergraduate students studying her work.
Lecturer Dr Matt Tomlinson invited Prof Cowlishaw to meet with the students enrolled in his 2nd year unit ANY2160 Understanding Prejudice and Discrimination.
While at Monash, Prof Cowlishaw is also presenting a paper in the Anthropologists@Monash Seminar series at 3.00pm on Tuesday, 19th September 2006. Her seminar paper is entitled: Erasing Social Trauma: Contemporary Australian History and Ethnography .
Later that evening, Prof Cowlishaw will be at Readings for the launch of her new book "Moving Anthropology: Critical Indigenous Studies", edited by Tess Lea, Emma Kowal and Gillian Cowlishaw. More Information on the Book Launch
In the 2005 NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Gillian Cowlishaw's book Blackfellas Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of Race (Blackwell Publishing) was awarded the Gleebooks Prize for Critical Writing. More information on the Gleebooks Prize
The Judges Citation for her Gleebooks Prize for Critical Writing Reads as Follows:
"In the prologue to this important and engaging book, Gillian Cowlishaw seeks eyewitness reports from townspeople (black and white) affected by the events of the night of 5 December, 1997, when a series of disturbances which became known as The Riot erupted in the main street of Bourke, rural NSW . Their testimony sets the scene for a probing examination of race, identity and racialized violence in Bourke, and beyond, to other settler colonies where Indigenous populations co-exist with a White majority.
Bourke, seen by many as a hellhole of violence and empty lives, is reconfigured by the author's empirical disclosures as a 'site of rich social relations'. With clarity and empathy, Cowlishaw sets out to disturb conventional interpretations of scenes such as The Bourke Riot (whites as mindless racists, blacks as angry victims) through the application of her anthropological eye for the telling detail. We meet a shopkeeper whose windows have been broken, 'It is absolutely over the top, everyone in the town is fed up…'; then segue to Andy, an Aboriginal man facing serious charges, who characterizes the riot as 'just a blue in the main street'. With her cast assembled and speaking their lines, Cowlishaw draws the reader closer and closer to the realities behind media images which shape our perceptions and misconceptions.
In a fine chapter called 'Performance', the author explores the dominant culture's view of the 'aberrant behaviour' exhibited by the Bourke Aborigines who regularly gather at the Post Office Hotel, the 'roughest pub in town'. Cowlishaw reframes this regular gathering, considering it as a performance, an assertion of presence, where an 'audience is required or assumed'. We discover that the December Riot was a 'skirmish in a long-standing homemade war involving contrasting traditions that want to claim the street as theirs'. Viewed by the white population - whose public demeanour is more restrained - the 'boisterous and rough sense of humor of Aboriginal sociality' becomes cause for alarm and disquiet, and, at a deeper level, an overt threat to the sovereignty of the street.
Drawing on critical discussion evoked by her own earlier study, Black White or Brindle (1988) set in the river towns of western NSW, the author repositions white racist voices at the interface of blackfella/whitefella rivalries in Bourke, eschewing the political correctness that seeks to silence racist outbursts. By allowing these voices to be heard, by listening to the full expression of hypocrisy and inconsistency, Cowlishaw exposes and interrogates 'the rivalries between imagined racial identities'.
This book is a finely argued case for alternate readings of received reports of racial violence, and is as pertinent to the recent incidents at Redfern, Sydney, as it is to rural Bourke in 1997. Cowlishaw draws on her strengths as an anthropologist, an ethnographer, and a writer of lively, lucid prose to bring us fresh insights into a vexed and misunderstood, and very timely, issue at the heart of Australian culture.
In the prologue to this important and engaging book, Gillian Cowlishaw seeks eyewitness reports from townspeople (black and white) affected by the events of the night of 5 December, 1997, when a series of disturbances which became known as The Riot erupted in the main street of Bourke, rural NSW . Their testimony sets the scene for a probing examination of race, identity and racialized violence in Bourke, and beyond, to other settler colonies where Indigenous populations co-exist with a white majority.
In a fine chapter called 'Performance', the author explores the dominant culture's view of the 'aberrant behaviour' exhibited by the Bourke Aborigines who regularly gather at the Post Office Hotel, the 'roughest pub in town'. Cowlishaw reframes this regular gathering, considering it as a performance, an assertion of presence, where an 'audience is required or assumed'. We discover that the December Riot was a 'skirmish in a long-standing homemade war involving contrasting traditions that want to claim the street as theirs'. Viewed by the white population - whose public demeanour is more restrained - the 'boisterous and rough sense of humor of Aboriginal sociality' becomes cause for alarm and disquiet, and, at a deeper level, an overt threat to the sovereignty of the street.
his book is a finely argued case for alternate readings of received reports of racial violence, and is as pertinent to the recent incidents at Redfern, Sydney, as it is to rural Bourke in 1997. Cowlishaw draws on her strengths as an anthropologist, an ethnographer, and a writer of lively, lucid prose to bring us fresh insights into a vexed and misunderstood, and very timely, issue at the heart of Australian culture."